Cutting through the noise – make more impact with your internal comms
How many times a day do you find yourself distracted from what you need to do by the ping of an ‘all teams’ notification? Or perhaps you check your inbox after a meeting to find a flood of emails, only to read them and realise most are irrelevant? According to some reports, the average professional now spends over two and a half hours a day just reading and responding to emails. But all this unnecessary communication doesn’t just make us unproductive as individuals, it also makes it hard for anyone who does want to ensure their message is seen and heard to cut through ‘the noise.’ If that feels familiar, then read on; this blog is all about how to make your internal communications more impactful.
Internal Comms – our own worst enemies?
With more people than ever before working remotely or in hybrid roles, and with workforces spread across different areas and time zones, the pressure to communicate more – to ensure your organisation is seen as transparent and open – has grown. Combine that with rapid advances in technology, as well as the increasing number of employees who’ve grown up with social media and want their internal comms to come in equally snappy bites and we now have so many different channels and platforms we can use to communicate with employees that, if you’re not carefully tracking everything, it can be impossible to know what’s working and what isn’t. When this happens, we tend to see that people default to ‘tell all’ – blasting out comms via all channels in the hope the message lands with someone, somewhere. The problem is when employees feel bombarded with unimportant information they switch off and become more likely to miss the things they really need to know. They don’t listen, you feel you need to send out more comms to ensure they do, and so on and so on. The classic vicious cycle.
The comms audit: figuring out what is and isn’t working
We tend to bang on about this a lot, but the first thing you need to do if you want to make your comms more impactful is find out what impact they’re currently having. When we did an audit for a big retailer, what do you think it found? (Hint, it’s related to this topic.) It found they were communicating too much. By far the biggest improvement they made after the audit was to cut down how much ‘noise’ was going out across the organisation, so that when employees did get communications they knew they were important and that they should make the time to read them.
Aim to come away understanding what people think about the current types of internal comms, but also what their preferences for future comms would be. For example, is the intranet best for big global updates and Slack better for team updates? Do they prefer email, face-to-face or just knowing where the information will be if they need to find it?
You also want to build a picture of the culture and work practices of teams across the business as this will help you start to refine your internal comms practices according to what will resonate best with these teams.
Review and refine
Once you’re armed with your findings you can then bring your key stakeholders together and start to make some strategic and operational decisions. Things to look at here include:
Clarifying the use of key platforms - making sure the purpose of each is crystal clear. Simplifying the mix of tools you use and choosing them for their user-experience, reach and functionality.
Defining what is ‘need to know’ and ‘nice to have’ communication as well as the difference between content and comms – and how and where these types of communications will happen.
Tips for improving impact
While specific needs and changes will depend on the nature of your organisation, there are some general things that will always improve the impact of your communications:
Post less frequently. You could, for example, have an email digest which consolidates news from different departments once a week and which employees will know to look out for. Keep it short with a visual, headline and a one sentence summary of each story, with a link to the full story on the intranet.
Tailor your messaging so that people get content that’s relevant to them. This could just be switching up the order of things in your emails so that one appeals more to your office-based workers and the other to those that are out in the field.
Segment your audiences so that messages only go to the teams or groups of employees they’re relevant to.
Consider who should be sending the message. Who is the authority, who will people most engage with or listen to if they tell them to do something?
Take a look outside. Look to different industries and different platforms to see what’s trending, what’s working and what’s going on in the world outside of the usual internal communications world.
Brainstorm with the broader business. Don’t just rely on the same voices to come up with something new. Make a point of capturing ideas and thoughts from different people across the business to keep your perspective fresh.
Test, test, test. Experiment with different formats, styles and see what works. Keep things small to start with, especially if it’s something new.
When the world zigs, zag. Look at your audit findings and spot the gaps - not just the messaging and channels, but the look and feel, tone of voice - what haven’t you tried? What would stand out and resonate with your people?
Ultimately, the old adage ‘less is more’ is still used today because it’s true. If people know the communications they’re going to get from you will be relevant, engaging and informative, they will take notice.
If you need help getting cut through with your internal communications, give us a shout. We’d love to talk through how we can help.
